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eftychia at 01:56pm on 2005-02-18A week or so ago I was thinking in the shower (thoughts seem especially slippery then) about tenses. Specifically, I was thinking about how bothering to learn (as a child, I hope) seemingly nitpicky things like the nuances of the perfect and pluperfect tenses leads to the ability to convey and understand fine shadings of meaning concisely. Now that's a pretty ordinary thought, but when I soaped the idea up, this emerged from the lather:
I started wondering about communication in language that lack such distinctions in tense -- I don't know what languages do, but I imagine there must be some (other than pidgins and creoles which, IF I understand correctly, often start out with a stripped-down set of tenses and wind up inventing most of the missing ones that the sources languages had in a non-standard form later ...?) But that's where the slipperiness of shower thoughts comes in, because that led to wondering ...
... whether people who write in languages that lack that specificity of tense find it easier or harder to write dialogue for time-travel stories than English-speakers (and, I'm guessing, other Romance (Latin-based) and Greek-influenced languages) do. There is, after all, that whole subjective/objective timestream issue regarding tenses, which gets even worse when a character loops on herself.
I also wondered what tenses English is missing that other languages have.
I'd been meaning to post this for a while, but was just reminded of it after I commented on a mailing list about how much confusion could've been avoided if "inflammable" had just been spelled "enflammable" from the get-go, and then added a silly request for a time-machine repairman.
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I think Hopi is the best known of the languages lacking a time concept in words, but I unremember whether the idea of "he did this morning" and "he is doing now" were just very fluid, or whether other things like context or phrasing carried the meaning across despite the lack of tenses..
<--- is language geek
Man, your shower thoughts are deep and meaningful, I'm lucky if mine get past the "ug, where shower gel.. ow ow, stuff in eyes, where towel?!" stage :>
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Yeah, I'm treading awfully close to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis territory here, though in this case I was thinking more about ease of expression than ease of conceptualization.
But I was amused to discover, when I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis) for the SWH while checking the spelling of Whorf's name, that the very discussion that reminded to write about this (flammable/inflammable) was actually something Whorf himself had a hand in!
(I also found it interesting -- and useful -- to learn on that same page that someone has coined a phrase to describe something unrelated to this discussion, that I've babbled about in various fora in the past: "the euphemism treadmill".)
My shower thoughts aren't always deep. Sometimes they're all wet. Frequently they're along the lines of, "What interesting modifications can I make to the tune that's stuck in my head?" or "How would I phrase a motivational speech to a particular collection of fictional characters?" And the ever-popular, "Damn, I got distracted by that train of thought and now I'm running out of hot water," and, "A little more hot water on that spot there and maybe this muscle will unkink a little."
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Speaking of nuances...
The implications behind this that you intended are obscure. Did you mean to imply that English is separate or part of the greco-romance-influenced languages?
Grammatically speaking, English is a germanic language: vocabulary was influenced by Latin (and ancient Greek), but English grammar is derived from German. Yes, German has things like pluperfect tense and even two cases of subjunctive forms (IIRC, English has only one subjunctive form).
Re: Speaking of nuances...
Re: Speaking of nuances...
I'm already in over my head here reading the comments about Hebrew and Japanese; if anyone wants to pile a bunch of German stuff on top of the pile I'm chewing my way through, well this thread is being a Learning Experience in the good sense of that phrase, so go ahead.
merely a data point
I can't speak for the usefulness in science fiction writing, because I've only just begun to struggle through Politiken.
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It is also possible that I'm confusing here features of modern and biblical Hebrew, and even something else entirely.
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Biblical Hebrew does this weird thing that sometimes (often?) uses what appears to be future tense to mean past tense. I don't know if Biblical Hebrew just doesn't do past tense, or what. If you see a vav at the beginning of an apparently-future-tense verb, it flips it to past. (For example, "yomeir" would be "he will speak", but "vayomeir" is "he spoke".) This doesn't happen in modern Hebrew, according to my Israeli husband.
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Woah, that's gotta make prophecies especially interesting.
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Biblical Hebrew does have a past tense. The vav-conversive, as best we can tell (it's unclear), often indicates sequential actions: if independent actions took place in the past (or will/might take place in the future), they're all indicated with past or future tense as appropriate, but when a sequence of related actions is set in the past or the future the first action takes the appropriate tense and the rest of the actions in the sequence take the opposite tense with vav-conversive. It's rather confusing, especially when it's then quoted elsewhere starting in the middle of the vav-conversive so it looks like the entire sequence is in the wrong tense....
Just as bad is that, since there's only "past" (== "perfect") and "future" (== "imperfect") tenses plus a few special forms constructed from the future tense (infinitive, imperative, participle/gerund), the imperfect tense can be used to indicate imperfect, future, conditional, occasionally the subjunctive mood, and even sometimes the present tense (which is normally done by using the participle/gerund form as if it were a verb instead of a noun). And as above, you need (occasionally missing) context to figure out which is which; most of the conditional uses contain marker words such as "im" ("if") or "pen" ("lest"), but not all.
All in all, there's good reason why experts are still debating the actual meaning of Hebrew Scripture.
BTW, the binyanim consist of four aspects (active, passive, causative, reflexive) in two intensities (normal and intensified), producing seven binyanim; the reflexive form doesn't have an intensified version, but is in some ways "intensified" all by itself. (I've noticed that, at least in Biblical Hebrew, its use tends to signal the involvement of free will — coerced or forced action tends to be presented as the causative form applied to the coercer instead. How many languages do you know that have a "free will" verb aspect?)
My pitiful Hebrew-related contribution
Apparently nobody much uses the complex binyanim in Modern Hebrew, as is the case, I'm told, with things like the masculine numbers and that sort of thing...
Japanese does all of its complex tenses by compounding verbs together, so they're sort of concatenated, as I recall, and/or by adding idiomatic expressions ("might be," "appears to be" etc.) into the verb.
Re: My pitiful Hebrew-related contribution
Whoa... that does seem like a useful construct to have at times, but I'll bet it causes a lot of confusion for people learning the language. It would sure hose me. :-)
Re: My pitiful Hebrew-related contribution
I'm curious about your source. I went to bilingual (English/Hebrew, including native-language teachers and some classmates) schools from pre-school though High School and was at various ages able to fool people into thinking I was a native Israeli, and none of this matches my experience.
"the complex binyanim"? Which are those? There are are roots which have standard meanings in only some of the 7 binyanim, or mean different things in different binyanim, so if you don't use certain binyanim you will lose parts of your basic vocabulary as well. To illustrate with two very common, very basic verbs: ktb 'write' is usually used in the qal binyan while dbr 'speak' is usually used in the pi'el binyan. If someone were to stop using either of these binyanim, they would lose some very common, very basic vocabulary. Some binyanim are used more than others, but all have some basic everyday words.
As for not using masculine numbers, they don't get used much for counting (as in counting on fingers) but if you use a feminine number with a masculine noun it really does sound wrong/non-native.
Re: My pitiful Japanese-related contribution
There's a good-sized appendix in the back of my Japanese intermediate grammar book full of auxiliary verbs that you can append to another verb to modify its action, and you can more or less tack on as many as you want. (The number of combinations of the four giving verbs alone is kind of daunting.) There's also a whole big group of nouns and pseudonouns that get attached to the ends of verbs in order to show markings that you might have been missing just from the aux-verbs.
That said, I've been sitting here trying to think how to express future perfect in Japanese using only verbs and not coming up with a way I'm sure will work--most things I think of just use simple imperfective with adjectival time-markers. :)
Re: My pitiful Japanese-related contribution
Erk. I meant "adverbial".
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Interesting classification. I've always seen the 7 binyanim described as active and passive crossed with standard, intensive, and causative, plus the reflexive which doesn't get a pair-mate because the active and passive have the same subject by definition.
What would you consider to be an example of intensified causative?
Po Ruski
English:
"I will have killed you five minutes before you were going to kill me."
Russian:
"I will kill you [...] five minutes before that time which you prepared to kill me."
Also, the word order is moderately flexible. I've arranged the nouns and verbs in the English way for comparison purposes.
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One point of interest on Russian (which I probably know best after English and Greek) is that it has perfective and imperfective verbs, and these can help convey nuances of meaning even though the number of tenses is limited. Perfective verbs connote a one-time or completed action and are generally conjugated in present and past form only; the present form also connotes intent to do something in the immediate future and so is not a purely "present" tense. Imperfective verbs are like the progressive tense in English, connoting ongoing action; they can be conjugated in present, past and future form. It gets even more fun when you take into account the fact that certain verbs -- specifically, the verbs for motion -- have three forms: perfective, imperfective and habitual. The latter refers to repeated motion.
To give an idea:
The verbs "idti" (imperfective), "poiti" (perfective) and "khodit" (habitual) all mean "to go" or "to walk". But you wouldn't use them interchangeably. You could use the first verb to say: I go, I am going, I was going, I will be going. You could then use the second to say: I will go (or I am about to go), I went. The third could be used to say: I am going (as I have done many times before), I went (more than once), I used to go, I was going (was in the habit of going), I will go (more than once), I will be going (repeatedly).
OK, I've yammered on long enough. Hope this was of some interest.